The Last Ember (38 page)

“I heard the drilling while cleaning the
lithostrotos,
which I do every night in the basement.”

The stone floor at the foot of the staircase was heavily marked by ancient graffiti. Drawings of concentric boxes were etched into the stones.

“What are these drawings?” Emili said.

“The Saturnalia games,” she answered. “These stones were the floor of a Roman prison inside Antonia’s fortress. The Romans were cruel captors and forced prisoners to play the ‘Game of the King.’”

“The Game of the King?”

“Jewish prisoners were often mocked by Roman soldiers and guards. It was a game in which the Roman guards would make you king for a day or a week, and then crucify you. Why do you think the last images of Jesus show him with a crown of thorns? The Roman captors would transform the Jewish prisoners into mock royalty. Here”—she pointed to the floor—“some of our finest preserved inscriptions on Roman
lithostros
are etchings by the prisoners, forced to play the Game of the King on the day of their death.” The boxes were filled with various astrological and pagan symbols.

“That’s why our convent is so important for Christian pilgrims. It is entirely possible that one of these stone etchings was done by Jesus himself. He was kept here, condemned by the Romans, along with other Jewish prisoners who were causing political trouble. That is why we lavish great care on the
lithostrotos
.”

The stone floor led into a large, Roman-era chamber. Broken columns lined either side of the walls. The floor of the cavern was the original—Roman tiles with shiny gray enamel. The only light came from a tall solitary candle atop an altar in the center of the room.

“This is remarkable,” Jonathan said, pointing into the darkness. “The bases of these columns are in the late Attic style, just as Josephus described.” The scholar in him couldn’t resist admiring their construction. “They are monolithic, and their capitals are carved with a Byzantine variation on the Corinthian style.” He raised his flashlight’s beam toward the cavernous ceiling.

“These arches are the support for the entire city. Jerusalem is literally a city built on stilts above vast valleys.” The sister pointed to an enormous boulder. “There was so much debris from the Roman destruction in A.D. 70, the Romans simply built a new city over the rubble.”

At the far end of the cavern, the basement’s stone pavement ended with a large body of water. The white beam from Jonathan’s flashlight stretched into blackness, not strong enough to illuminate the other side of the water.

“This water must flow beneath the Temple Mount,” Emili said. “Was it an ancient cistern that serviced the fortress?”

“Not a cistern,” the sister answered. “It was a moat that separated the ancient fortress from the Temple Mount.”

“These waters lead directly to passages beneath the Mount?” Emili asked.

“In the early 1860s they did, and it was possible to raft across this water to the other side of the subterranean vaults. But in 1862 the British expeditions of Charles Warren accidentally floated into this basement with a stick swaddled in kerosene. The nuns mistook him for a ghost, and they ordered a wall built to close off the water tunnels.” She pointed at one of the archways above the black water. “But through that arch, there is rumored to be one tunnel that still leads into the vaults beneath the Mount.”

“That tunnel?” Emili pointed to where the water stretched into the darkness beneath a large stone arch.

The sister nodded.

Emili walked toward a decrepit wooden rowboat, floating in the algae, its bottom caked with the sediment of the water’s edge.

“May we borrow this?”

“Wait a minute,” Jonathan said. His eyes edged over to the old small boat and then back at her. “You’re not suggesting we go in that thing?”

“It’s the only way, Jon.” Emili flashed a pained smile. “We’ll have to go beneath the Mount on this boat.”

“Boat? Even if that thing was
ever
a boat,” Jonathan protested, “it’s now more like a
raft
. We don’t even know if it floats!”

Emili turned to the sister. “Does it float?”

“I think so, but I wouldn’t—”

“See?” Emili smiled at Jonathan. “It floats.”

Without another word, she stepped inside the small wooden dinghy, crouching for balance.

Jonathan held up his index finger, trying desperately to come up with an argument to talk her out of this, but reluctantly stepped in behind her
.
The boat was wobbly on the water, and they gently guided it by pushing off the stone columns that emerged from the water’s surface. Their weight in the small boat made it lie low in the water, scraping against some ancient rubble. After a minute, the water deepened and a slow current formed as they moved from the shore in the convent’s basement into the darkness.

The ceiling, now higher than either of them would have imagined, was the underside of the street level. The daylight through the grates of the alleyway flickered on the water like moonlight.

The pace of the boat picked up in the dark current, knocking the dinghy against the walls of the tunnel.

The boat plummeted forward as though over a waterfall, reminding Jonathan of the stomach-drop feeling of a log ride. He instantly leaned back to shift the boat’s weight. Just when Emili was nearly thrown over the boat’s front end shot upward, hitting the water, and flinging her backward into Jonathan’s lap. The boat righted itself, heaving back and forth, bobbing along a water channel between low stone embankments.

Jonathan steadied himself and leaned over the boat’s edge. The beam of his flashlight descended into the blackness. As though floating through midair, the boat glided across an ancient aqueduct bridging an abyss.

The boat reached the other side of the aqueduct, running aground on the sandy floor of a narrow passageway. The eastern wall resembled a canyon’s rock face, its jagged rust-colored stone vaulting upward. Facing the rock wall, on the corridor’s other side, a man-made wall of enormous rectangular stone blocks rose to a dizzying height. Sunlight seeped through the blocks, casting pinpoints of light on the Temple Mount’s original rock face.

“This giant retaining wall was built by Herod to extend the Temple beyond the edge of the mountain’s rock face,” Emili said, moving down the corridor. The sound of dried leaves rustled at their feet. Jonathan flashed his light down, and saw they were standing in an ankle-deep pile of dried-out paper scrolls.

“It must be the western fortifying wall,” Emili said.

“How do you know?” Jonathan asked.

“For centuries, Jews have put written prayers between the stones of the Western Wall.” She patted the stone blocks. “Before some crevices were reinforced, the scrolls must have pushed others further in until they wound up here, inside the Mount.”

The corridor led away from the light, and the floor was covered in litter, soda cans, and plastic bags. Evidence of a dig site became clearer. Picks, crowbars, shovels, hand augers, and metal scrapers all lined the walls.

“Not exactly scientific instruments of excavation,” Emili said, anger rising in her voice.

On the wall, a small inscription describing priestly duties glistened with a clear gel that had been recently applied. Jonathan leaned closer to the wall and lifted his hand to touch it.

“Don’t!” she said. “It’s a highly concentrated compound of hydrochloric acid.”

“How do you—”

“The smell. It’s a sulfur-based acid with vitriol. It’s been used to dissolve stone since the Middle Ages.” One more application of the chemical and the ancient inscription would be no more legible than any other crack in the jagged rock surface.

The strategic destruction became more apparent as they walked farther, past random piles of dirt, clay, silt, and topsoil, as though entering the mind of the Waqf Authority itself. Along one corridor, ancient painted pottery lay in pieces amid pickaxes and empty gallon jugs of solvents. A handsaw lay on top of a half-mutilated mosaic. The teeth of the saw were halfway through the sky-blue tiles that once illustrated what appeared to be a priestly service of some kind. Jonathan looked closely and saw blue enamel along the side of the pickax. Emili ran her fingers across what was left of medieval Templar emblems
.
Many of the tiles were already removed and thrown in a bucket.

Emili removed her digital camera and documented the destruction, photographing the crude equipment, the destroyed artifacts, the plastic gloves for handling destructive solvents.

“Do you hear that?” she said. The sound of drilling hummed faintly in the distance. “That way.” She pointed down the corridor.

“Em, you have evidence now.” Jonathan glanced at her camera. “I’m not sure we should go any furth—” But she was already charging down the corridor.

“You know, it’s quite rude when you do that,” he called out, following her.

The humming sound gained in volume and energy. The corridor led to an ornate flight of ancient stairs carved out of the rock wall.

At the top of the stairs, bright light seeped in around the edges of a modern steel door.

“What do you think is behind it?” Jonathan said.

“The Royal Cavern,” Emili said. “It must be where they are excavating.”

“The Royal Cavern mentioned in Josephus?” Jonathan said, an eyebrow up. “That supposedly stretched one thousand feet in diameter. That’s nearly the width of the entire Mount. No one has seen it since antiquity.”

“
Almost
no one. In the 1880s, some British explorers snuck in without the Ottoman overlords’ knowing, and claimed to hold Masonic meetings inside there.”

“And they are your scientific sources?”

“You have a point,” Emili said.

They approached the door’s hem of light. The stairs were narrow and steep, almost a stone ladder. Jonathan climbed first, leaning into the rock face to keep his balance.

Once at the top, he put his hand on the door’s cold metal handle. The dark corridor they had just walked through, the steep stone staircase, the bright light from behind the metal door; it all seemed eerily like a posthumous vision.

One thousand feet in diameter, Jonathan thought, turning the knob. It must be a myth.

A
hmed Hassan straightened his black hat as he waited in line for the last security check before entering the Western Wall plaza. A large American synagogue tour stood in front of him, dozens of teenagers taking pictures with the Israeli soldiers as their colorful knapsacks moved through the X-ray machines. Amid the chaos, Ahmed stepped through the metal detector unnoticed. Now, standing on the other side, he watched the prayer book follow behind him on the X-ray belt, knowing that if it was mishandled, its contents would detonate.

“Where are you from,
habibi
?” asked a tall, thin Israeli policewoman about ten years older than Ahmed. His large brown eyes turned glassy, frozen with fear.
Why is she speaking Arabic to me? Habibi
was an Arabic word, meaning “my darling.” But the policewoman’s smile thawed Ahmed’s nerves, reminding him that he had heard countless young Israelis adopt Arab words as endearing slang. The usage infuriated many of Ahmed’s friends.
First they take our land and now our language
. But Ahmed enjoyed hearing these strangers speak his language. If only for a moment, Ahmed could understand them.

“From Yemen,” Ahmed said, as instructed by Salah ad-Din. The immigration wave of religious Yemenite Jews to Jerusalem made Ahmed’s answer to the policewoman not only believable, but common.

She swiped up the prayer book from the X-ray belt and held it loosely from its binding.

Ahmed began to sweat.

“One more question,” the Israeli policewoman said.

The boy’s wide, attentive eyes watched her.

“What is this week’s
parasha
?” she asked, using the fast-track security check reserved for religious Jews who should know the weekly Torah reading.

Ahmed exhaled in relief, grateful that Salah ad-Din had prepared him for this singular question. Effortlessly, he pronounced two words of Hebrew, and the Israeli woman grinned. She handed him the prayer book and gestured toward the Western Wall.

“Pray for me,” she said somewhat cynically before turning to the next tourist.

Ahmed nodded uncomprehendingly.

A department-wide investigation would eventually reprimand the policewoman for using a fast-track security question known to have been circulated by Hamas after a list of training questions from El Al security personnel had been stolen two months before. The investigation also reprimanded her for not picking up a number of clues that surfaced on the surveillance video. The clip to Ahmed’s skullcap was too long, befitting a kaffiyeh clip. The woolen tzitzit had the washed-out pink stain of blood in the chest where a messy sewing job stitched together a tear in the fabric, roughly the width of a
shafra
, the serrated knife that had been used frequently in recent attacks on West Bank settlers.

Ahmed crossed the plaza and walked toward the ticket booth for the Western Wall Tunnel tour along the northern wall of the Western Wall plaza. Unexpectedly, the lights inside the booth were on and a teenage Russian girl wearing a cleaning uniform was wiping the windows from the inside. Without glancing up, Ahmed walked past her and around to the back of the booth. He took the vials of nitrocellulose from inside the prayer book, and noticed the adhesive side of the duct tape was so covered in jacket lint he was not certain they would stick. He bent down and pressed the tubes to the wall of the booth, careful not to shatter them. He unbuckled the cheap Casio watch from his wrist and opened the reverse side of the watch face, removing a coiled copper wire, which he wove between two of the vials.

He gingerly removed his hand and offered a brief prayer in gratitude that the duct tape adhered to the wall. He walked away from the booth in the direction of the Western Wall, as instructed, in case anyone was watching. After spending a minute at the wall feigning silent devotion amid a crowd of young men dressed identically to him, Ahmed walked out of the plaza.